I admit I was a bit taken aback a few months ago when Deuce Richardson approached me about writing for The Cimmerian. My first impulse was to turn him down.

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We know that Robert E. Howard was a big fan of the movies. His letters to Tevis Clyde Smith and Harold Preece mention numerous films that Howard saw and many, such as The Mark of Zorro (1920) and Robin Hood (1922) with Douglas Fairbanks, no doubt had some influence on his yarns (a full list of films mentioned by Howard, along with an brief discussion on the subject by Rusty Burke is available on the REHupa website). One film, though, that Howard never explicitly mentions, but that scholars have often wondered if he saw, is King Kong (1933). King Kong was revolutionary film when it came out, with incredible stop-motion animation that would influence future filmmakers for decades. It was the Star Wars or Avatar of its day. And with its theme of savagery versus civilization and hints of a lost advanced culture on a Pacific island it had elements that surely would have appealed to Howard. But if he did see it, there is no mention of it in the existing corpus of his letters.

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Of songs sung on the Western frontier, most of them, especially cowboy songs, originated in Texas, since that state was the first Anglo-American region to truly deserve the designation of “West” in the proper sense. Texas songs went up the Chisholm with the longhorn herds and spread all over the West, being changed in other states to correspond with the locality in which they were sung. Other songs – hunter’s and rivermen’s – came through the Middle-West. A few originated in America, most were old British ballads changed by ignorance or intent, taken from, and added to, to suit the minstrels’ notions. Its strange how old some of those songs are, and how long the old ballads lingered.

– Robert E. Howard to H.P. Lovecraft, ca. October 1931

Sixty-four years after Robert E. Howard touched on the connection between his beloved cowboy songs and the British Isles from whence his bloodline hailed, an ace mandolin player from Alberta, Canada, embarked on what was then a unique project. David Wilkie and The McDades blended cowboy songs with traditional “Celtic” instrumentation — the tin whistle, the harp, the fiddle, and, of course Wilkie’s mandolin in an infectious CD titled “Cowboy Celtic.”

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A previously unknown copy of the exceedingly rare 1937 Herbert Jenkins first edition of A Gent from Bear Creek has been just been discovered by noted Robert E. Howard scholar Patrice Louinet. This is only the thirteenth known copy of Howard’s first published book to be located and it could very likely be one of the nicest copies in existence. Judging from the photos, it appears to be in better condition than the Darrell Richardson copy, which sold at auction last month for over $12,000. Louinet found the book last week with an automated online search and quickly purchased it from the UK bookseller that had listed it. The exact events are best described by Louinet himself (as posted at TGR):

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I announced an upcoming Breckinridge Elkins webcomic here at The Cimmerian last December. Australian artist Gary Chaloner posted today on The Official Robert E. Howard Forum that his new website dedicated to his comic adaptation of Howard’s Gent from Bear Creek is now fully operational:

Just letting everyone here know that the brand-spanking new webcomic and website has launched over at www.BreckinridgeElkins.com ! Pages will update weekly initially, but if the feedback is good, we hope to increase the frequency. More articles and extras will be added as the weeks roll by as well.

So please pop on over and give the online adventures of Breck Elkins a go!

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A Hasidic Jewish mystic roams the West, battling demons of the astral plane, relentlessly pursuing his renegade teacher. This is the premise of a new set of four novellas by Edward Erdelac, a screenwriter and storyteller who names Robert E. Howard as his “all-time favorite writer.”

The key to spinning a successful weird tale is for the author to “believe” the story he is telling. A hip, ironic, tongue-in-cheek approach might make for good campy fun, but it destroys any sense of the strange, the menacing, the macabre. By rooting his the mystical adventures of The Rider in actual Jewish folklore, Erdelac creates depth and resonance that no mere make-believe demonology an match. And he plays it straight.

The four tales in Merkabah Rider: Tales of a High Planes Drifter have a skewed, bizarre Spaghetti Western feel — and that’s when they’re working in the “real” West. Things get really strange when The Rider abandons his body for extraplanar travel. The setting owes more to the Sergio Leone aesthetic than to the authentic West. However, there are a few obscure nuggets that make a Western history aficionado smile — like the True Name of Sadie in “The Nightjar Woman. And in the second novella in the collection, “Dust Devils,” there is a wonderful direct homage to Howard’s “Kelly the Conjure-Man.

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John Wesley Hardin by Michael Shreck

Long narrative dreams are fairly common with me, and sometimes my dream personality is in no way connected with my actual personality…  I’ve wandered all up and down the 19th Century as a trapper, a westward-bound emigrant, a bar-tender, a hunter, an Indian-fighter, a trail-driver, cowboy — once I was John Wesley Hardin!

– REH to H.P. Lovecraft, February 11, 1936

Robert E. Howard was fascinated with John Wesley Hardin, probably the deadliest Western gunman of them all. It’s not hard to see why: the Texan possessed the qualities of skill at arms, physical prowess, indomitable will  and go-to-hell attitude that Howard infused into all his protagonists. In fact, Hardin might have been one of Howard’s characters. He once wrote, “Some day I hope to be able to use the life of John Wesley Hardin, either as a biography, or a basis for a historical novel.”

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This Cimmerian blog entry is a bit out of the ordinary. Following Damon C. Sasser’s recent post on the REH:Two-Gun Raconteur blog, fellow blogger Al Harron and myself both started to work on articles about proposed Howardian movies. Thus, instead of posting two blog entries with some overlap, we decided to revive the Auld Alliance and to provide a joint entry. Hence, this piece is a collaborative effort, co-signed by Alexander Harron and Miguel Martins.

The film purportedly based on REH’s mighty-thewed “Dark Barbarian” from Cimmeria has begun shooting in Bulgaria, but sadly, the positive news on the Conan project provided by Patrice Louinet tends to be drowned in a miasma of depressing, outrageous and otherwise unpleasant news. Damon Sasser was the messenger of doom last week, as he brought a number of upcoming Paradox projects to our attention.

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It’s fair to say that Steve Tompkins brought me back to Robert E. Howard.

I never lost my appreciation for Howard’s work; how could I? It had inspired me to become a writer. But by millenium’s turn it had been years since I’d actually read a Conan story or plunged into the adventures of El Borak or Solomon Kane. I never decided to put aside Howard, it just sort of happened as I explored new horizons, new frontiers.

As the Internet developed into a massive cultural resource, I got curious about what the Web could tell me about Howard. I found The Barbarian Keep and read Don Herron’s The Dark Barbarian. It was gratifying to see that the stories that had brought me so much pleasure in my youth still had resonance for so many people.

Then I found the Robert E. Howard United Press Association Web site and discovered an essay by one Steven Tompkins: “Grinning, Unappeased Aboriginal Demons — Every Pict Sure Tells a Story — and an American One At That.”

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They were of a new breed growing up in the world on the raw edge of the frontier — men whom grim necessity had taught woodcraft. Aquilonians of the western provinces to a man, they had many points in common. They dressed alike — in buckskin boots, leathern breeks and deerskin shirts, with broad girdles that held axes and short swords; and they were all gaunt and scarred and hard-eyed; sinewy and taciturn.

– Robert E. Howard. “Beyond the Black River”

It is a game most Howard fans indulge in — at least those who share his taste for history. Who could fit the bill as a real-life Conan?

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